I peeked over the roof of the car just in time to see her lower her gun and take a wobbly step in my direction. Her face was dirty and streaked with tears. There was a lot of white showing in her eyes, and her mouth had formed into a gaping frown.

It looked like surprise. But what type, I couldn’t be sure. Was it the relieved kind of surprise? Or something else?

Anne-Marie took another shaky step, then a third — this one making her stumble — but her eyes remained fixed on me the whole time.

Something told me to stay put.

“Honey!” I yelled.

“Mark?” she said again, with another sob.

“Sweetheart, the gun,” I said, using the forced, calm tone of a hostage negotiator. “I need you to drop it. OK?”

—

Our familiar little hotel never felt so safe. It was our sanctuary, the first place we thought of going to escape the horror show and gather our wits.

I sat in the recliner, wrapped in a blanket I’d stolen from the bed, taking deep breaths. Anne-Marie lay curled up on the bed in her hotel-issue bathrobe, staring at me. She had had a shower, and her wet hair was wrapped up in a towel.

The way she looked at that moment — tired, scared, and unsure about the next step– sort of melted me, as wound up as I was. But this was no time to get soft. It was time to get some answers. I didn’t quite know where to begin. “What are you doing with a gun?” seemed like a decent starting point, though, so I went with that.

“It was Jessica’s idea,” Anne-Marie said, shaking her head and sighing. “I didn’t want to take it. But she forced it on me. She said I might need it.”

“Need it? For what?”

“She never said. ‘Trust me,’ that was all she said.”

I scratched my chin. “I didn’t think I could like Jessica any less than I already did. But now–”

“Don’t, Mark,” she said. “She’s … just doing her job.”

“Her job? What the hell?”

Anne-Marie stood up and went to the window. She ran her fingers over the drapes as she stared at the street outside.

“I don’t know exactly what she does,” she said. “Just that it’s government-related. She says she can’t tell me more than that.”

“And you believe her?” My head was already starting to hurt, and this seemed like just the beginning of all the headache-inducing stuff I was about to hear.

Anne-Marie turned and fixed me with the most serious look I could ever remember seeing on her face. “Yes, I do,” she said.

I shook my head and rubbed my eyes. Then I opened them. Nope, it wasn’t a dream. Damnit.

“OK, OK,” I said, waving my hands in front of my face. “Let me get this straight..”

But before I could think of a good way forward, she turned back to the window and said, “I’m doing all of this for her. As a personal favor.”

“Doing what, exactly?”

She turned from the window again, slowly walking across the room, back to the bed, and sitting down. Whatever was on her mind made her head hang down, like a losing boxer slouched in his corner, waiting for the next round’s bell. She toyed with the belt of her bathrobe and didn’t look at me.

“She popped up out of nowhere about six months ago,” Anne-Marie said. “I bumped into her at the grocery store. ‘Oh my god, what a coincidence!’ All that stuff. I hadn’t seen her in years, almost since college. But I don’t think it was a coincidence now. I think she’d been looking for me.”

“That sly bitch,” I said.

Anne-Marie ignored my outburst and kept talking. “So I met her for lunch a couple days later, and that’s when she told me she worked for the government. Some secret agency, intelligence or something. She was really vague. But even back in our school days, I knew that she’d been doing something hush-hush for the government.

“Anyway, she told me that her ‘people’ were watching a guy who lived in our apartment building. They said he was involved in something illegal. Again, no details. She said it was better that I didn’t know the details.”

“Howie?” I said. For the first time in this whole nightmare, something suddenly seemed to click into place in my tired, distraught brain. “They were watching that loser?”

“Yeah, that was my reaction, too” she said. “Jessica said all I had to do was be friendly to him, chat with him, listen to what he said. Then report everything he told me. She made it sound so easy.”

I shook my head. “Babe, how could you let yourself get involved in something like that?”

“Like I said, it was a favor to her. I owed her.”

“For what?”

Anne-Marie breathed a sigh again and slowly resumed her lying-down position on the bed. She brought her knees to her chest and hugged them, then closed her eyes as she spoke.

“Back in college, we weren’t good friends or anything,” she said. “She was a friend of a friend, that sort of thing. This was around the time when the stuff at home with Dad was getting bad. He was hitting Mom a couple times a week — belts, old curtain rods, beer bottles, stuff like that. Threatening to kill her. He was at the point where I remember thinking, ‘Shit, he might actually do it.’”

I nodded. She didn’t talk about those days with her family much, so whenever he did, I tried to keep my big mouth shut and listen.

“One day, Jessica and I were talking at school — just small talk, nothing important,” she went on. “And out of nowhere, I broke down crying, thinking about all the bullshit going on at home. It was like a flood. She sat me down and put an arm around me. She listened to me for, like, half an hour as I told her about it. I poured it all out to this person who was virtually a stranger.

“When I got to the part about Dad threatening to Mom, Jessica got really quiet. I could tell she was really thinking about it. Then she said, ‘I might be able to help you with that.’”

I could barely believe what I was hearing. The story was getting more and more eerie as it went along. “Help you?” I said. “How?”

“That’s exactly what I said. ‘How?’ And she told me she knew some people who might be able to — how did she put it? — ‘reason’ with Dad.”

“And you agreed?”

Anne-Marie shrugged. “I was desperate at that point. I’ve told you that much before. I was messed up myself, not wanting to call the cops and reveal the whole situation to the world. Not wanting Dad to go to jail, no matter how bad he was getting. I would have tried anything to avoid that. Major denial. I asked her if Dad would get hurt. She said no. So I told her, ‘OK.’”

“So what did she do?”

“That’s the thing,” she said. “I never found out. Jessica wouldn’t tell me. All I saw was the effect. From that point on, Dad never laid a hand on Mom again. He was still an abusive asshole — verbally, I mean. But even that wasn’t as bad as it was before Jessica got involved.”

My head was throbbing. “Holy …”

“Yeah, I know. Whatever she did, it worked. I asked her about it afterward, but she just said it was best I didn’t know. She wouldn’t tell me. I never found out.”

“That’s … insane.”

“Tell me about it,” Anne-Marie said, rising from the bed. “But what a favor, right? So when she came to me with this Howie thing, it sounded like such an easy way to pay her back. So I agreed.”

There was another little click in my brain. “So that’s why you were riding me to apologize to Howie the other morning. I was messing up Jessica’s little operation.”

“It was stupid,” she said. “You guys were both drunk at the party, and you called him ‘Ginger Kid’ or something like that, and he stormed out.”

Finally, my great offense had been revealed. “I called him that?” Despite all the gravity in the room at that moment — and despite Howie’s gory end — I couldn’t help but chuckle.

She shot me a classic Anne-Marie look of disapproval. “I was supposed to be keeping up a neighborly sort of friendship with him. Make him feel comfortable enough to tell me things. You were messing things up, as usual, dear.” She managed a weak smile. “Anyway, now you know.”

“Well, now I know part of the story,” I said. “I still have a few questions, though.” I stood up and started pacing. I started counting off each question using my fingers.

“Like the cat food bag that wasn’t holding cat food, for example. Like where you were this morning when things went all Jerry Bruckheimer at our apartment building. Like who you called on the that throwaway cell phone — the guy who called you Englethorpe. Like–”

“You … used that cell phone? Mark, I–”

“Englethorpe?” I repeated.

“Yeah, Englethorpe,” she said, sort of blushing. “That’s sort of my … codename, I guess you could call it.”

I sighed. Somehow, I knew she was going to say that.

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